Key findings indicate that 84% of corporations are
leveraging virtualisation for storage, and nearly one-third of respondents
have 75-100% of their current environment stored in a virtualised
environment. Of those that store data in a virtual environment, 40%
experienced at least one data loss event in the past 12 months - down from
65% in 2011. Interestingly, 52% of corporations actually believe
virtualisation software decreases the chance of data loss.

It is a common misconception that virtual environments are
inherently safer than, or at less risk from data loss, than other storage
media. Although virtual servers have redundancies built-in, increased
complexity generally means more potential causes of data loss, including
file system corruption, deleted VMs, internal virtual disk corruption, RAID
and other storage/server hardware failures, and deleted or corrupt files
contained within virtualised storage systems. The effects are also usually
far more serious because the volume of data stored in a virtual environment
is exponential to that stored on a single physical server or storage device.

The survey went on to reveal that only 33% of companies
were able to recover 100% of their lost data, which represents a 21%
decrease from 2011, when 54% were able to recover 100% of their data. The
other 67% of respondents disclosed that they were not able to get all their
data back from their most recent data loss event.

As the use of VMware has matured into a more mainstream
infrastructure and it appears fewer data loss incidents are occurring,
organisations are still experiencing these incidents. The decreased
ability to fully restore data proves that by not engaging an experienced
data recovery service after a virtual environment data loss the risk of
permanent data loss increases.

When asked about how organisations attempted recovery, the
largest portion of respondents, 43%, actually rebuilt the data. Only one in
four looked to a data recovery company.

724 IT professionals participated in this survey in August
2013. 223 respondents took the survey in-person at VMworld 2013 in the U.S.,
while 466 from EMEA and 35 from APAC responded to the survey online.

Common sources of virtualised data lossThough virtualised data storage may provide an
efficient and secure way to save your data, there are still risks.